Friday, January 19, 2007

ROCKIN' with Cole Foster of Salinas Boys Customs, at the SF Rod, Custom & Motorcycle Show

Cole Foster and I finally met! I'd been admiring his work for years. Suddenly there he was in front of me at my set-up at the SF Rod & Custom show. It was a nice, nice moment.

Many of you rockers know Cole led the collaboration on Mike Ness' '54 Chevy custom (shown here, and also the car Mike's driving in the photo on the book's foreword page, taken by his wife Christine). Cole lowered the car, later dropped in a 327 with a powerglide, re-worked the front suspension, smoothed the firewall, and chopped the top. Later it went off to Marcos Garcia's Lucky 7 shop in Antioch, CA for its killer paint job.

It's said that Cole "creates cars that are so clean they don't have lines--they simply flow." He's built customs and bikes for guys like Sammy Hagar, and is very well known for constructing Kirk Hammett's '36 Ford (shown on ROCKIN's page 232 in bare metal).